Sweden was until now proudly leading the advance in the War On Cash, the neo – Maoist ruling elite had pushed the idea that a cashless society, with all financial activity moved to electronic media would protect citizens from crime and be more convenient. There was no mention when the idea was pitched by politicians and bankers that in a cashless society we would completely surrender control of our money to banks, and our privacy in financial matters to government security agencies. Yes, every electronic financial transaction is recorded, your spending habits are tracked, and while disreputable organisations like Google, Facebook and Twitter will sell that information to anybody who can afford to pay, governments can use it against you in many other ways.

In a surprise turnaround Sweden’s Riksbank this weekend has become the first central bank in the 21st century to take concrete measures to ensure that cash does not disappear as a means of payment from the financial system, in opposition to corporate efforts to force retail customers away from cash. To achieve that the Riksbank proposes, in a document published on its website, to mandate that all banks and financial institutions continue to offer cash services.

The policy initiative comes in response to a recent proposal suggestion by the Riksbank Committee that only the country’s six major banks should be obligated to continue offering cash services.

That prompted a reaction from Sweden’s competition watchdog, which argued that the plan would distort competition as it would affect only a few of the nation’s banks. In response, the Riksbank has opted to apply the rule to “all banks and other credit institutions that offer payment accounts.”

There was also a disagreement between the RiksbankCommittee (a political overseer,) and the central bank’s senior management over what deposit facilities should be offered. While the Committee recommended that banks should only be obliged to provide deposit facilities to businesses, the Riksbank believes it is important for banks to also offer deposit services to private citizens:

“This is a service that consumers can reasonably expect of credit institutions. There must also be symmetry between withdrawal and deposit facilities. In the Riksbank’s view, there is otherwise a risk that the possibilities for individuals to make deposits will decrease even further in the future. For most consumers, it would also be difficult to understand why they can withdraw cash from an account but not make deposits.”

For yearsnow, both the ultra progressive Swedish the government and the Riksbank management have been pushing for a “cashless society.” The Riksbank has over 1,000 articles posted on its website on the “cashless society“. The emphasis worked: between 2013 and 2017, the amount of cash in circulation dropped by 35%, earning Sweden a reputation as the world’s “most cashless nation”.

Many of Sweden’s bank branches had stopped handling cash altogether, but now will have to begin doing so again. Many of them are not happy about it arguing that access to cash should be the sole responsibility of the state and not private banks.

“To secure access to cash is a collective good that the state should reasonably be responsible for,” the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority said. It’s an opinion that’s shared by ATM provider Bankomat, which argued that it should be the state’s responsibility to ensure that citizens have access to cash since the handing of notes and coins is such an important — and expensive — part of a country’s infrastructure.

Shops and restaurants, could also be affected by a suggestion that retail operations which provide public services, such as pharmacies, transport services, food shops and petrol stations, should also “be included in an obligation to accept cash.”

One likely result of this is that many people who struggle to navigate the digital system, or who don’t have credit cards, in particular the elderly, no longer have to fear finding themselves locked out of the country’s payment system.’ There is also that section of society known as ‘the underclass – and yes Sweden does have them despite government efforts to present the nation as a socialist utopia in which things like poverty, crime, prostitution and begging are unknown. Sweden’s parliament has also launched a review on the impact of going cashless too quickly as it excludes the financial needs of the elderly, children and tourists who rely on cash.

It is a dramatic u-turn for a country that not so long ago was further along the path toward eliminating cash than just about any other advanced economy. Sweden enlisted its citizens as largely willing guinea pigs in an economic experiment that was doomed from the start — negative interest rates. People quick on the uptake will have worked out in such a system we, the punters pay the bank to gamble with our hard earned. But a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) has its limits with consumers as long as cash remains an alternative because while you have to pay for the privilege of having money in the bank, stuffing it in a matress or under the floorboards is free. And that is the true explanation of the eagerness to eliminate cash. It was not for our protection or our convenience, but to make stealing from us easier for banks, financial services companies and governments.

New Global Crisis Imminent, New Geneva Report Warns
The Geneva Report refers to a “poisonous combination of high and rising global debt and slowing nominal GDP [gross domestic product], driven by both slowing real growth and falling inflation”. The total burden of world debt, private and public, has risen from 160 per cent of national income in 2001 to almost 200 per cent after the crisis struck in 2009 and 215 per cent in 2013. “Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt to GDP ratio is still growing, breaking new highs,” the report said.

Cashless Society – The Resistance Begins Here
A seaside market town in Norfolk may be less than 100 miles from the world’s financial capital, London, , it may be the commercial centre of West Norfolk’ as the town website boasts, it may be home to 45,000 people — but there, unlike in London, cash is king.

Establishment Pushing ‘Cashless Society’ to Control Humanity
The global establishment is increasingly pushing the notion of what it calls a “cashless society” — a world in which all payments and transactions would be conducted electronically, creating a permanent record for governments to inspect and track at will.Multiple governments from Africa and Asia to Europe and …

Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins, the top bureaucrat to whom Theresa May has delegated most of her Prime Ministerial negotiating powers on Brexit, is being head – hunted by a number of major investment banking corporation, for a role in their organisations after the EU negotiations are complete.

The unelected civil servant has openlt expressed admiration for the tyrannous bureaucracies of the Soviet Union, noting that the autocratic Communist leaders transformed Russia “from a backward peasant autocracy, despised by the West, into a technological giant at whom the world cowered in fear for half a century”. Obviously Olly hasn’t read any histories of the Soviet era.

Such sentiments have helped to fuel a widespread belief among Leave-supporting politicians that Robbins, like all senior civil servants a rabid Remainer, would rather Britain would not leave the European Union at all and become a vassal state of the EUSSR. He has been the driving force pushing the Prime Minister towards a soft ‘Brexit In Name Only’ in which the UK will remain subject to the EU’s institutions and regulations in many respects and continue to pay £billions into the EU while not enjoying the few benefits of membership.

However, his theoretically neutral position has now been further compromised by the news that he is being headhunted by investment bankers willing to pay him a million pounds a year to advise them on strategy post Brexit. There is a clear conflict of interest and he should be fired from his civil service post.

Many of the biggest banking corporations, including Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup poured big money into the Remain campaign, and there are concerns that the prospect of a salary many times larger than Robbins could expect to earn even at the very top of the Civil Service could impact his decision-making in the EU negotiations.

“Olly has his exit strategy,” a source remarked to the Sunday Times. “Every man and his dog in the City wants him.”

This omnibus page is about documenting the global elite’s “War On Cash” (yes that is a bit over dramatic and click – baity, but we have to compete for attention,) which is not about making life better for the masses as we are told it is, but about enabling government agencies to increase their ability to extend surveillance of all our activities. One of the topic we have previously looked at several times is the rapid rise of Sweden’s cashless society, where a natuarally conformist mindset among the people has made them all too ready to accept that cashless was the progressive, liberal way forward and cooperate with the authoritarian left wing government’s demands for ever greater control over people’s money and private lives. The myth that digital is safer. combined with the ‘ease-of-use’ narrative has left many stores no longer accepting cash at all and even sparked anxiety among Swedish authorities that:

“If this development with cash disappearing happens too fast, it can be difficult to maintain the infrastructure” for handling cash.“

Last year, the amount of cash in circulation in Sweden dropped to the lowest level since 1990 and is more than 40 percent below its 2007 peak. The declines in 2016 and 2017 were the biggest on record.

But the pace at which cash is vanishing has authorities worried.

“One may get into a negative spiral which can threaten the cash infrastructure,” Mats Dillen, the head of the parliamentary review, said.

“It’s those types of issues we are looking more closely at.”

Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves has said Sweden should consider forcing banks to provide cash to customers. It seems that a few people at least are waking up to how easy it is for tech – savvy crooks to steal or scam money form inexpert users of online systems. Surprisingly it is the left that are showing most convern, The Guardian reports, a small but growing number of Swedes anxious about their country’s rush to embrace a cash-free society.

While many large western nations have that nagging doubt in the back of their mind that government may not be all-virtuous, naive, gullible, brainwashed Swedes – until now – have not…

“The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough to have mostly nice ones for the past 100 years,” says Christian Engström, a former MEP for the Pirate Party and an early opponent of the cashless economy.

“In other countries there is much more awareness that you cannot trust the government all the time. In Sweden it is hard to get people mobilised.”

…but there are signs this might be changing. Following discussions by the country’s central bank, concerns about a cash-free society have emerged into the mainstream, says Björn Eriksson, 72, a former national police commissioner and the leader of a group called the Cash Rebellion, or Kontantupproret.

The Guardian report continues, “until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.”

“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.

“If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.”

In this sense, Sweden is far from its famous concept of lagom – “just the right amount” – but instead is “100% extreme”, Eriksson says, by investing so much faith in the banks.

“This is a political question. We are leaving these decisions to four major banks who form a monopoly in Sweden.”

The best case scenario is that we are not as secure as we think, Mattias Skarec, 29, a digital security consultant, says – the worst is that IT infrastructure is systemically vulnerable.

“We are lucky that the people who know how to hack into them are on the good side, for now,” he says. “But we don’t know how things will progress. It’s not that easy to attack devices today, but maybe it will become easier to do so in the future.”

The Pirate Party – which made its name in Sweden for its opposition to state and private sector surveillance – welcomes a higher political profile for these issues, according to The Guardian. Look at Ireland, Christian Engström says, where abortion is illegal. It is much easier for authorities to identify Irish women who have had an abortion if the state can track all digital financial transactions, he says. And while Sweden’s government might be relatively benign, a quick look at Europe suggests there is no guarantee how things might develop in the future.

“If you have control of the servers belonging to Visa or MasterCard, you have control of Sweden,” Engström says.

“In the meantime, we will have to keep giving our money to the banks, and hope they don’t go bankrupt – or bananas.”

Bananas indeed. And there you have our reasons for having always opposed the idea that cashless is the way forward. Like most ‘progressive’ ideas the policy is politically motivated and has the aim of curtailing individual freedom and extending government control. Consider this: a few years ago, with Quantitative Easing (QE) having failed to lift the western economies out of the doldrums following the 2008 crisis, bankers, politicians and economists seriously discussed the idea of levying a charge on savings and deposits held by banks for individuals.

The result, in those nations most at risk, was a rush to withdraw savings. It was after that exercise the push to go cashless intensified. Why? Simples: if the banks hold all your wealth in digital form, you can’t withdraw it and stash it under the floorboards, in the mattress or buy jewellery and valuables to protect your wealth.

Donald Trump is portrayed as a clown by mainstream media and his combover is the silliest I have ever seen. Still, he’s a billionaie so I don’t suppose he gives a flying fuck what The Daily Stirrer thinks of him. Not that we think he is all bad, anyone who attacks Obama’s global naziism trade deals, TTIP and TPP mush have some good points.

Greece draws up drachma plans, prepares to miss IMF paymentGreece is preparing plans to nationalise the country’s banking system and introduce a parallel coupon currency so that citizens can carry on their day to day activities in the event of the Eurozone taking steps to defuse the simmering debt crisis. Sources in the governing Syriza party said the government may be forced to take the unprecedented and high risk step of missing a payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as early as next week.

New Global Crisis Imminent, New Geneva Report Warns
The Geneva Report refers to a “poisonous combination of high and rising global debt and slowing nominal GDP [gross domestic product], driven by both slowing real growth and falling inflation”. The total burden of world debt, private and public, has risen from 160 per cent of national income in 2001 to almost 200 per cent after the crisis struck in 2009 and 215 per cent in 2013. “Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt to GDP ratio is still growing, breaking new highs,” the report said.

Cashless Society – The Resistance Begins Here
A seaside market town in Norfolk may be less than 100 miles from the world’s financial capital, London, , it may be the commercial centre of West Norfolk’ as the town website boasts, it may be home to 45,000 people — but there, unlike in London, cash is king.

Establishment Pushing ‘Cashless Society’ to Control Humanity
The global establishment is increasingly pushing the notion of what it calls a “cashless society” — a world in which all payments and transactions would be conducted electronically, creating a permanent record for governments to inspect and track at will.Multiple governments from Africa and Asia to Europe and …

Are the Bilderberg Group meeting, this weekend in Dresden, Germany, really The Shadow Government (the New World Order, The Illuminati,) that rules the world?

For years the Bilderberg Group denied its own existence. Now thanks to the diligent work of dedicated investigative journalists we know it is real, yet many ‘liberals’ ‘progressives’, globalists and university dumbed down idiots still insist it is all a conspiracy theory.

But when you look at who is attending the shindig in Dresden this weekend it’s hard to imagine such people giving up their time just to get together for a chat. If fact their multiple links to big power and big money make a complex web that links the world’s major banks, corporate businesses and political organisations.

Here’s a handy chart to show who’s who (or more accurately who owns whom) at Bilderberg. Click through on the image and then enlarge until the text is readable (only suitable for PCs, Laptops and tablets.)

Here’s a handy chart to show who’s who (or more accurately who owns whom) at Bilderberg. Click through on the image and then enlarge until the text is readable (only suitable for PCs, Laptops and tablets.)

Unfortunately while the banks and technology giants have been ironing out problems with contactless payment technology (like its habit of doing your good deed for the day by paying for other people’s stuff), the crooks have been forging ahead with non-accidental ways to rip off your card. Thieves can easily steal key data from contactless credit and debit cards using equipment bought “easily and cheaply” online, consumers magazine Which? has warned UK consumers.

War On Cash Gathers Momentum – Germany Unveils Cash Controls
On Monday (1 February, 2016) just two days ago, Bloomberg called on the central banks of the world to “bring on a cashless future” in an Op-Ed that calls notes and coins “dirty, dangerous, unwieldy, and expensive.”
We can imagine it would be quite easy to harm someone by firing large coins at them from a gun and terrorists could probably stuff an improvised explosive device with small coins rather than nails or nuts and bolts. And if …

One by one the stock markets were crashing all over the world yesterday. What have I been telling you? The ‘economic recovery’ was never anything of the kind. Since before the 2008 crash, but at a more intense rate, the central banks, governments and commercial banks have been inflating bubbles within bubbles in an effort to maintain the illusion that they were in control. The truth is the recession that became a crash has turned into a depression as deep as the great depression of the twentieth century. Which is not what you wanted to hear before Christmas.

Unfortunately the monster the establishment created could not be controlled, it has to be fed or it will die of course and their monster grew so big it devoured everything. Printing money (Q E) has failed because it devalued everything, inflating asset values has failed because few in the developed nations can now afford to buy homes as increasing prices outstripped increases in earnings, bolting down interest rates to stupidly low levels failed because maxed out consumers could not take on more debt even at 3,4, or 5 per cent.

It was inevitable really, the case is that the west has pumped trillions of dollars into a system that was bloated with debt in the first place. As a result of enormous QE programmes that have almost universally rewarded only a few bankers and billionaires* while enormously increasing the burden on taxpayers. Almost every asset has had its value blown up so it can serve as collateral on more loans, the whole system has been so bloated it looked likely to burst for a long time.

Now there is no more money to throw on the bonfire, the Ponzi scheme is imploding. Control freak politicians and business leaders thought they could beat market forces by manipulating markets, in the end we have all ended up in hock to Uncle Rothschild.

Is this the big one or will “The Controllers” once more manage to stretch sticking plasters over the jagged stumps of severed limbs? Will We The People be fool enough to keep on consuming or are we about to enter a period of self imposed austerity which will snowball into a deflationary avalanche?

Things could appear to unravel much more quickly than in previous bust cycles. This is because they are already unravelling but corporate control of the media has presented bad news as good. The energy bust began 4 months ago and already prices have fallen 40%. We could see $50 a barrel soon. And, already we are seeing stock prices falling and rating agencies throwing downgrades around like confetti. Is that good? Only in the short term, we poor punters are never going to see a 40% reduction in our bills or the cost of filling the car and looking further ahead it means profits will drop, jobs will be lost and demand will dry up.

Housing markets will be hit too. Even the insane market in London, where a broom cupboard can sell for £250,000, property prices in some areas are starting to stutter. Property prices have for a long time underpinned the value of the currency but a correction is overdue.

Looking at the carnage around the world yesterday, all the major asset classes look likely to take more hits; energy, property, stocks, tech and bonds, and it is long overdue. A measure of how insane the global economy has become is that Uber, a taxi booking software service with no assets is valued at $40billion for its Stock Market launch. We are seeing a repeat of what happened just prior to the dot.com bust just 15 years ago.

Even commodities took a small hit yesterday so there really is nowhere to hide. Good thing I bought some acreage and have been practicing aiming a shotgun and saying “Get orf moi laaaaaaaaand.” We could be on the way back to feudalism. Keynesians may now with to retire to their chamber with a bottle of Single Malt of Vintage brandy and a loaded revolver before I say ………………………..

I Told You So

Quantitative Easing involves insolvent governments issuing bonds and central banks buying them in, effectively the taxpayers are buying government debt. This is bad enough, but with base interest rates (the rates at which governments lend to banks) at zero or close to zero and bonds carrying a 3.1% (USA), 3.5% (UK) and up to 10% for basket case economies like Greece, all that happens is banks borrow from the government at 0.5% and lend the money straight back at 3%+. Nice work if you can get it.

I should have come as no surprise to learn the German government has approved plans to force creditors into propping up struggling banks across Europe.

Boggart Blog warned at the time of the Cyprus bail out bank snatch that Germany was behind the confiscation of ten percent of deposit balances from accounts held in Cyprus banks. We learned at the time from contacts in The City that Germany and the Euronazis of the Brussels Bureaucratiic Dictatorship saw the Cyprus exercise as a trial run for the time when, inevitably, the ridiculous single currency system dragged down the large, solvent economies of northern Europe to the economic basket case status of the PIIGS nations (I predict a cypRiot) and it became necessary to impose a similar levy or savings tax across the Eurozone.

That time is not here yet, not quite. but Germany has a reputation for forward planning so we can be sure they see a time when citizens of the Eurozone are required to compensate the German central bank for the money it spends propping up lazy and incompetent ruling elites in the Eurozone nations just like the citizens and residents of Cyprus were required to.

As WSJ reports, Germany’s cabinet Wednesday approved plans to force creditors into propping up struggling banks beginning in 2015, one year earlier than required under European-wide plans that set rules for failing financial institutions.

The new bail-in rules are part of a package of German legislation on the European banking union–an ambitious project to centralize bank supervision in the euro zone and, when banks fail, to organize their rescue or winding-up at a European level.

Germany “leads the way” in Europe by implementing European rules quickly and “creates instruments that allow the winding-down of big systemically relevant institutions without putting the financial stability at risk.”

What this means is that taxpayers (theoretically) will not be on the hook (though in reality we are sure the mutually assured destruction defense will be played – especially if Deutsche runs into problems) but as German authorities explain, “This ensures that in times of crisis mainly owners and creditors will contribute to solving the crisis, and not taxpayers.” As a gentle reminder – creditors includes depositors…

Unfortunately not everyone’s buying the no-taxpayer-impact concept (remember Cyprus?) We certainly aren’t. going to be a busy time converting cash into easily concealed portable property, preferably gold (hard, shiny gold, definitely not ‘gold funds’ or ‘gold derivatives’) as that looks like being the de facto reserve currency soon.

And those of you who were recently wailing and gnashing teeth about UKIP’s alleged racism, we’ll let the Eurorats know you are so keen on their totalitarian single European superstate agenda you want to donate 100% of your saving to the cause of global fascism.

RELATED POSTS:

War On Cash Gathers Momentum – Germany Unveils Cash Controls
On Monday (1 February, 2016) just two days ago, Bloomberg called on the central banks of the world to “bring on a cashless future” in an Op-Ed that calls notes and coins “dirty, dangerous, unwieldy, and expensive.”
We can imagine it would be quite easy to harm someone by firing large coins at them from a gun and terrorists could probably stuff an improvised explosive device with small coins rather than nails or nuts and bolts. And if …